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Project aims

The hypothesis of the project is that building sustainability impact assessments of organic/ecological farms, building on the FAO SAFA Guidelines (FAO, 2012) and other relevant approaches will lead to the most comprehensive and internationally recognised sustainability monitoring system of organic/ecological farms. Such a monitoring system will help i) improve the sustainability performance of organic/ ecological farms and ii) addresses many of the criticism of organic/ecological agriculture by demonstrating directly the actual sustainability performance of such farms.

The overall aim of the project is to transfer the FAO SAFA guidelines into a set of societal level indicators (i.e. water quality, soil health, biodiversity) which can be used in a sustainability monitoring system of organic/ecological farms. It is intended that the indicator sets will be appropriate for labelling, policy- monitoring and farmer-decision making approaches. To achieve this aim, the project will pursue the following sub-objectives.

To analyse and evaluate existing sustainability assessment approaches of farms and identify suitable indicators or sets of indicators to assess the sustainability performance of ecological/organic farms by evaluating their environmental integrity (including animal health and welfare), economic resilience, social wellbeing and good governance.

To identify interdependencies and correlations between the identified performance outcomes and indicators on the basis of scientific literature,

To synthesise the results into draft guidelines for applications of the indicator sets to assess and monitor the sustainability performance of organic/ecological farms for farmer decision-making, policy monitoring and labelling/communication with consumers.

Implementation:
The work will be undertaken in four work packages (WP) related to the above sub-objectives. Both partners will be involved in all work packages.